Alex Marshall

Career From 1988 to 1997, Marshall worked as a staff writer and columnist for the Virginian-Pilot, In 1998 and '99, Marshall wrote a bi-weekly opinion column as a correspondent for the Virginian-Pilot.

Marshall left the paper in 1999 for a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He moved to New York City shortly thereafter, where he continued his freelance journalism.

In a 1995 article in Metropolis magazine, Marshall denounced New Urbanism as "a grand fraud". Marshall continued the theme in numerous articles, including an opinion column in the Washington Post in September of the same year, and in Marshall's first book, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).

Andrés Duany, the architect whose Duany Plater Zyberk & Company is among the leading promoters of New Urbanism, and some of whose projects had come under Marshall's strongest criticism, dismissed Marshall's criticisms in an interview for the Daily Princetonian, saying that Marshall, ". . . cannot stand the fact that we're working with the middle class. He wants us to spend all our time with the poor."

New Urbanism advocate James Howard Kunstler gave Marshall negative reviews of How Cities Work, in Metropolis Magazine. Kunstler wrote,

Books The Surprising Design of Market Economies (University of Texas Press, 2012), Beneath The Metropolis: the Secret Lives of Cities (Carroll and Graf, 2006), How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (University of Texas Press, 2001),